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Archives: IAB-Veranstaltungen

We invite submissions on program evaluation of policy issues related to the labor market.

This workshop is planed by the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST) and The Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU). It will be expected to have around 10 presentations and poster session. We invite submissions on program evaluation of policy issues related to the labor market. Papers including innovative approaches or methodological contributions are particularly welcome.

Specific Topics

  • Policies towards the unemployment (UI, training, activation policies)
  • Lobor market policy effects on inequality (in wages, occupations, job tasks, etc.)
  • Policies to integrate migrants into the labor market
  • Policies aiming at curbing discrimination on the labor market / or gender norms
  • Relationships between labor market policies and health
  • Labor policies for firms
  • Innovative methods for policy evaluation
  • Machine learning in policy design and in policy evaluation

Does schooling create new skills or does it just provide signals of individuals’ underlying abilities?

Does schooling create new skills or does it just provide signals of individuals’ underlying abilities? This is a classic question in economics, and to date, it has been difficult empirically to measure the extent to which one theory dominates.

We provide new, innovative evidence on this important question in the context of adult education in Brazil. In 2018, police in Rio de Janeiro abruptly shut down eleven high schools, showing evidence that these schools sold diplomas without providing any training whatsoever. These schools thus provided signals but not human capital. We match student records to historical employment records. We find that initially the return to high school degrees is similar regardless of whether students earned legitimate or fake diplomas. Average returns are sizeable for both. However, within a couple of years, the fake diplomas start losing their value. Employment rates drop to pre-treatment levels, and wage premiums erode. By contrast, true diplomas enjoy larger and stable employment rates and rising wages. We also find additional evidence that the speed at which the fake credential loses its value increases in situations where productivity is more likely to be observable.

Overall, the results provide strong evidence that, at least in the short-run, the signaling model seems to explain labor market outcomes, but that the saliency of the signal erodes quickly.

The workshop aims to bring together social scientists to discuss the most recent findings related to migration and integration.

Since February 2022 millions of people from Ukraine were forced to flee their homes to seek protection in less waraffected regions of the country and abroad, others have stayed under the war-related risks. Europe experienced the largest influx of refugees since the second world war.

Unlike labor migrants, refugees have no time to prepare for migration and, thus, face particular challenges in their host countries including limited knowledge of the local institutions, a lack of language skills and social networks as well as traumatic experiences that may have long-lasting effects on people’s lives. At the same time, the socioeconomic circumstances of the men and women who remained in Ukraine changed drastically, affecting their employment, their families and other areas of life.

The workshop aims to bring together social scientists to discuss the most recent findings related to migration and integration, labor market and family outcomes of Ukrainian refugees, stayers and IDPs and encourages contributions
on the following topics:

  • selection of refugees, decision to stay, emigrate and return
  • family and labor market dynamics in Ukraine
  • refugee socioeconomic integration
  • health, social networks, and social inequality
  • gender, paid and unpaid work
  • refugee uncertainty and its outcomes
  • ethnic discrimination of refugees
  • human capital investment and skills transfer of refugees
  • effects on home and host countries’ economy and population

This study is about the effect of the minimum wage on robot adoption in Germany.

We study the effect of the minimum wage on robot adoption in Germany. By exploiting the variation of whether and to what extent a plant is affected by the minimum wage introduced in 2015, we document a positive effect of the minimum wage exposure on plant-level robot adoption. Using administrative worker-level data, we find that the minimum wage introduction raises the incentives for plants to adopt robots only when it affects the workers in simple manual occupations.

The empirical findings are consistent with the prediction through the relative factor price channel based on a task-based model of robot adoption.

This study is about changes in wage premia and employment across the firm pay distribution, during a large immigration wave in Germany.

The arrival of migrants with low reservation wages strengthens the monopsony power of firms. Firms can exploit this supply of “cheap” migrant labor by offering lower wages, though at the cost of forgoing potential native hires who demand higher pay. This monopsonistic trade-off can lead to large negative effects on native employment, which are concentrated among low-paying firms.

To validate these predictions, we study changes in wage premia and employment across the firm pay distribution, during a large immigration wave in Germany. These adverse effects can be mitigated through policies which constrain firms’ monopsony power over migrants directly, such as collective bargaining, or indirectly, such as policies that facilitate the labor market integration of migrants.

The paper develops a theoretical framework to study the effect of minimum wages on poverty and bring this framework to the data.

We develop a theoretical framework to study the effect of minimum wages on poverty and bring this framework to the data using a detailed individual-level panel dataset combined with information on county-level minimum wages from urban China and both a first-differenced multinomial logit model and a difference-in-differences approach. We show that theoretically the impact of minimum wages on poverty is ambiguous while empirically China’s minimum wages have had a moderate yet significant poverty reducing effect.

Digging deeper, we demonstrate two countervailing mechanisms at work: higher minimum wages help pull some workers out of poverty, while simultaneously pushing a smaller number of workers into poverty. Results are robust to a wide range of sensitivity checks including using various different poverty lines, while subgroup analyses notably show that the effect of minimum wages on poverty is most pronounced for women.

Joint with:
Sylvie Démurger, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and CNRS
Carl Lin, Bucknell University
Dewen Wang, The World Bank

This study is about linking post-partum experience to fertility intentions on over forties.

While motherhood is often portrayed positively, many women experience significant emotional post-partum challenges. These negative experiences may shape future family planning decisions, yet their impact on fertility intentions remains understudied.
Using a sample of Italian mothers, emotional distress was measured using a four-item scale assessing tiredness, sadness, inadequacy, and loneliness. Regression analyses were conducted to assess the relationship between emotional distress and fertility intentions, controlling for relevant socio-demographic factors.

A significant negative association was found between post-partum emotional distress and fertility intentions. Mothers experiencing higher levels of emotional distress reported lower intentions for subsequent childbearing, with this effect primarily driven by mothers over 35 years old.
Post-partum emotional distress is associated with a reduction in mothers' fertility intentions, particularly among older mothers, challenging idealized narratives of motherhood and highlighting the need for a more nuanced understanding of maternal experiences.
These findings underscore the importance of addressing maternal emotional well-being in reproductive health policies and suggest the need for enhanced post-partum support services, especially for older mothers.

This paper studies the role of wages and job benefits in job search behavior. We use wage and benefit data from a market-leading employer review platform and run a large-scale randomized control trial on an online job board to estimate the elasticity of job seekers' applications to posted wages and their willingness to pay for job benefits. A 10% higher wage increases job seekers' probability to view and apply to an ad by 3-5%. Many job benefits are highly valued by job seekers: Home office and company cars are valued at around 15 percent of wages, company-provided child care at 10 percent and and parking spots at around 7 percent of wages. The average vacancy offers job benefits worth 25 percent of wages. We further document that higher-paying firms typically offer more amenities. Taking the distribution and valuation of job benefits into account, we show that job value inequality is significantly higher than wage inequality. 

Legal rights continue to differ between women and men, particularly in developing countries. In this paper, we examine whether economic integration can improve gender equality by the law during working life. We design a novel instrumental variable strategy based on regional waves of globalization, which serve as strong exogenous predictors of national globalization trends. Our main estimate suggests that an increase in globalization by one relative standard deviation, equivalent to a permanent transition from Indonesia to the United States, is associated with an 12.1% increase in gender equality, measured by the extent to which men and women are treated equally by law. We also find that this effect is almost entirely driven by de facto globalization. Linking globalization to more than 300,000 individuals from over 100 countries, we provide evidence for a microfoundation of the macroeconomic effects.